Thursday

Aug 9, 2018 at 12:01 AM

Six months ago, I wrote a middling review of “Black Panther,” for which I’m still getting grief from readers. Allow me a moment to put that discussion to rest, then move on. “Black Panther” was a competently made superhero movie that stuck to a superhero movie formula. It came across — to me — as a by-the-numbers exercise, but it struck a chord with both comic book fans and an underserved black audience. My thoughts about it were opinion, not fact. And I ended up in the minority. “Black Panther” made a ton of money, almost a billion and a half worldwide.

Which brings us to “BlackKklansman,” a brilliant tour de force from Spike Lee, a visionary filmmaker who has missed as often as he has hit, and has, more time than he cares to remember, been referred to as an angry black man. Here’s a prediction: It will be celebrated by longtime fans and adventurous, open-minded audiences — black and white — and will be ignored or derided (without even being seen) by racists, bigots, and most Trump supporters.

The topic of racism is right at its center, and it features good cops, bad cops, black- and Jew-hating rednecks, forward-thinking students, and the inherent evil of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet amidst its searing seriousness, it also offers a nicely placed sense of humor — people often forget how funny Spike can be — that helps makes it one of his most accessible and entertaining movies.

Set in early-1970s Colorado, it tells the based-on-fact story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), who applied for and got the position of the first black police officer in Colorado Springs. Sporting one hell of an afro hairdo (as do many other characters in the film) and a lot of ambition, he lets his chief know he’s not happy being assigned to the Records Room; he wants to be an undercover cop. He doesn’t have long to wait because the Colorado College Black Student Union has invited activist Stokely Carmichael — by then known as Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins) — to give a lecture, and the chief decides that Stallworth, wired up for sound, would be the perfect guy to mix in with the crowd and gather any information about potential troublemakers.

It’s in this early segment that Spike tactfully shows off his filmmaking chops. During the powerful and engaging lecture, he keeps shifting his cameras from portrait-like shots of students in the audience, to cops in a squad car listening to Ron’s wire, to Ron, who is slowly getting caught up in speaker’s message of a future revolution.

But this is all just an introduction to what the script has in store. The main story turns to Ron being transferred to intelligence, where he goes about setting up a complicated sting on the local KKK branch that involves him shifting his voice to a “King’s English” accent and making contacts by phone, while pairing up with fellow officer Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), who does in-person meetings with Klan members while pretending to be Ron.

On the way to getting all of this told, we’re presented with the racist monster Felix (Jasper Paakkonen) and his nasty, long-suffering wife Connie (Ashlie Atkinson); a romantic interest for Ron in Patrice (Laura Harrier); a lowkey but forceful performance by Topher Grace as the vile and deceptively charming KKK Grand Wizard David Duke; plentiful use of the N-word; and a terrific pop-soul ’70s soundtrack (too many songs to mention).

Spike is not only spot on in his direction of actors and in getting such a many-layered story told so fluidly, he also keeps piling on examples of his filmmaking prowess, one of the best being the juxtaposing of a scene with Duke running a hate-fueled initiation ceremony, to one of another visitor to the school, played by Harry Belafonte, who quietly and compassionately recalls a sobering memory of a lynching.

The story in “BlackKklansman” finds its way to a short fuse of unbearable tension near the conclusion, yet Spike and his fellow scriptwriters manage to give the film something of a positive ending. Until, that is, it all lurches from the ’70s to today, with slap-in-the-face wake-up calls featuring incidents in Charlottesville and the face and voice of Trump. It’s as if Spike just couldn’t help himself. Nor should he have.

— Ed Symkus writes about movies for More Content Now. He can be reached at esymkus@rcn.com.